


Relative

by throughadoor



Category: Nip/Tuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-21
Updated: 2005-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 09:00:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1642883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/throughadoor/pseuds/throughadoor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I think that, deep down, he was hurt that I didn't want to look like him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Relative

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Sandy

 

 

"Tell me what you don't like about yourself, Mr. Beauchamp."

"It's my nose."

"So, you're saying you're not happy with the results of the plastic surgery you've already received?" Sean replies smoothly.

The client's nose job is pretty decent, Christian thinks that Sean could probably do better, but other than that, he just hopes they don't have a Michael Jackson on their hands, the last one got completely hysterical when they refused to perform a fourth elective septoplasty and they almost had to call the cops.

"You can tell?" Mr. Beauchamp says, touching his nose with the tip of his finger, like he's expecting it might fall off.

"There are," Christian says, "certain characteristics of a rhinoplasty that a plastic surgeon is able to recognize. They're rarely obvious to the untrained eye."

Sean leans forward, which is what Sean always does when he wants you to know that he really means whatever he's about to say. "In my professional opinion," Sean says, "you've had excellent work done. It's also important to be aware that with each subsequent sculpture of your cartilage, you run the risk of a whole host of medical problems, including swelling of the sinuses, contracture scarring, nasal obstruction--"

"Oh, I don't want you to make it smaller," Mr. Beauchamp says. "I want you to make me look like this."

He slides a picture across the desk. It's himself except younger, bad acne, cheap tuxedo, and a very prominent, unattractive hook nose.

"You--what?" Christian says before he can catch himself.

"Maybe this will help you understand," Mr. Beauchamp says, and slides another photograph out of his jacket. Christian hopes he doesn't have the entire fucking family album in there. The second picture is much more recent: Mr. Beauchamp with his nose correction and some old guy with glasses and Mr. Beauchamp's old nightmare nose.

"I take it this is your grandfather?" Sean says.

Mr. Beauchamp nods. "My mother died when I was born," he says, and Christian's not exactly sure what this has to do with his nose, but he folds his fingers together and puts on a bland smile. "My father wasn't in the picture," Mr. Beauchamp continues, "so my grandfather raised me. As you can tell," he smiles a little, "it wasn't hard to guess we were related. I loved my grandfather, but I hated his nose. Kids made fun of me, girls wouldn't date me, you know how it is. So when I turned twenty-one, I took the money I'd inherited from my mother's life insurance policy and I -- got it fixed. My grandfather pretended that he didn't mind, but I think that, deep down, he was hurt that I didn't want to look like him."

Mr. Beauchamp takes a deep breath, and in the next few moments it feels like he's sucked all the oxygen out of the room. Sean bobs his head up and down so encouragingly that Christian thinks it might fall off. But Christian's been thinking that for eighteen years and it hasn't happened yet, so it probably won't happen today, either. Christian allows his smile to stretch slightly tighter across his face. All this insincerity is giving him wrinkles.

"Several months ago," Mr. Beauchamp finally says, "my grandfather passed away. He was -- he was the only family I had, and It's been," Ms. Beauchamp pauses, and Christian can see that Sean's hand is itching to reach for tissues they keep in the bottom desk drawer. "I just really miss seeing his nose," Mr. Beauchamp says. "I'd like you, if you can, to put it back."

Sean knits his hands together. "Well, it's a slightly more complicated procedure," he says, "It would involve sculpting a prosthesis--"

For about a year when Christian was a kid, he had an elaborate fantasy where some older woman -- usually a nurse, but sometimes a swim instructor -- would see the fist-shaped birthmark on his left shoulder blade and realize that he was her long-lost son, the one she'd given up any hope of locating ever since she woke up from her five-year coma.

"--work we've done with burn victims, as well as patients who are recovering from nasal-palate cancers," Sean is saying, "if you like, it's not the same, obviously, but the technique for reconstruction would be similar--"

The ironic part was that the birth mark faded away to nothing but a ghost of pigment variation by the time he was thirteen.

"--can't guarantee that the prostheses will look exactly like your old nose, Mr. Beauchamp, we can use photographs to guide our work, but a two-dimensional representation will always result in--"

The _really_ ironic part was that he grew up to have a kid he didn't know about, and the kid hadn't spent any time looking for him at all.

"--why don't we go ahead and schedule a preliminary exam for early next week?"

 

 

 

 

Julia called at two am. Christian was asleep, but hardly. The cocktail waitress who had just finished sucking most of his brain out through his dick had her head on his shoulder and one clammy possessive hand on his chest; he knew he'd need to roll over so she wasn't touching him before he could relax and pass out.

He thrashed his hand against the night table until he found the phone, and answered it low and snarling, except that it was Julia, and she said she was sorry, but the baby wouldn't stop crying, Sean was out of town, she didn't know what to do, it was just that the baby wouldn't _stop_.

Christian rubbed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. He called her Jules, and told her to calm down, and told her he'd be right over.

He kicked the cocktail waitress out of bed almost immediately, slapped her on the ass with the light hand and said that he had to go and so did she, because there is no way I trust you not to steal my stuff.

Sean was at a conference on maxillofacial trauma in Atlanta. Christian hadn't gone with him because someone has to hold down the business, or what there was to speak of it, which, if Christian was being honest, was not that fucking much. Christian knew that with Sean's board scores, he could have gotten hired to work for any of the big nip and tuck shops in Miami, but Sean said he wanted Christian, he wanted their stupid pipe dream, and he wanted the partnership.

They'd blown through most of Sean's inheritance at this point.

Christian let himself into the apartment and Julia was standing in the kitchen, holding the baby, but awkwardly like he was a sack of flour. She said she didn't know what was wrong with him, he wouldn't stop crying, he wouldn't sleep, he wouldn't nurse and he wouldn't stop and she didn't know what to do. There was a piece of hair that had escaped from her pony tail hanging in her face.

Little Matt was pretty much just screaming his fucking head off, and Christian edged around to face Julia, putting his hands on her shoulders. He told her it was going be okay, and let her pass the baby into his hands, and Christian thought he could actually feel Matt's body vibrating from all the noise he was trying to make. He asked her if she'd said he wouldn't breast feed, and she nodded, cupping her chin with one hand the way that she did when she was nervous.

Any time someone tried to take advantage of the two little letters that came after Christian's last name for free medical advice, he scorned them and asked if he looked like a walking magnet for a malpractice suit. But Julia was hardly anyone, so he racked his brain for anything he might possibly remember from his terrifying rotation in neonatal as a resident, and he asked if there was any blood on Matt's stool.

Julia's eyes went wide, and she repeated his words back to him like they were in a language she didn't understand. Christian said blood, blood in his, you know, diaper, and he passed the kid from the crook of one arm to the other, jiggling lightly, but nothing seemed to help.

Julia said that there had been a little bit that morning, and that she had been worried, but the kid had seemed fine, and her voice picked up panic along the way because, oh my God, was he really sick?

Christian hoped very, very much that he was not talking out of his asshole, and told her it was probably nothing, but that there was a chance Matt was allergic to milk.

Julia's face crumpled, and Christian could see her mouth trembling with weight against her palm. Her voice skated in pitch with each word, and she said that she was a fucking shitty complete failure of a mother, because you're telling me that my baby doesn't even want my god-damned breast milk.

Christian wasn't very good at Julia in pieces. His first instinct was always to stroke her hair and touch the soft part of her eyelid with his finger and kiss her, and the one time he went with that, it broke a lot more than it fixed. Instead, he held her kid, he told her it was no big deal, he told her that, hey, most of the time it was hereditary, and she should ask Sean if it had happened to him.

All this pretty much did the exact opposite of making her feel better, that much was obvious, and if he was being truthful with himself, that was when Christian knew the truth.

 

 

 

 

Later that afternoon, they're prepping for a routine breast augmentation when Christian says, "So, I don't think we should take the Beauchamp case."

Sean is rubbing soapy water around the circles of his. "Why is that?" he asks, and the tone in his voice makes Christian wonder if Sean ever wishes that he was a little bit more of an asshole so he didn't have to embark upon the Socratic method every time he disagreed with someone.

"Think about it," Christian says. "Guy wants us to give him a complete nightmare nose. When he comes to his senses, he can sue us, and how are we going to defend ourselves? No one in their right mind would actually make someone look like that on purpose."

"We can request that he have an outside psych consult if you like," Sean says, and that's the voice that reminds Christian that Sean's probably glad that he's _not_ an asshole, because it lets him turn on the moral authority like a light switch. "But I think," Sean continues, "that we should do the surgery. For most of our patients, we're taking away something about themselves that they perceive to be ugly. I think we should honor a person's right to chose to restore something to the way he believes it was meant to be."

Sean gives him the eye and Christian doesn't say anything. He knows that Sean will go ahead and put Mr. Beauchamp on the schedule for a pre-op consult next Tuesday, and he'll leave an open copy of Archives of the American Academy of Facial and Plastic Surgery on the table in the break room, some article about blah blah patient and observer rated analysis blah blah lateral rhinotomy blah blah comparative facial aesthetic scores. Christian won't read it.

Sean subscribes to Archives, Journal of the American Society of Maxillofacial Surgeons and The New England Journal of Medicine. Christian subscribes to GQ, Maxim and Hustler, and he's currently seeing a girl who he makes put a bag over her head when he fucks her, so he guesses that Sean can be the judge of how restoring someone to his God-given ugliness falls under the parameters of the Hippocratic Oath.

"Ready?" Sean says, lightly, after a minute. Christian nods. It's their first surgery together since they kicked Quentin to the curb for good, and Christian's not exactly going to tell Liz to put "Reunited" on the stereo or anything, but there's no need to ruin it by fighting over a hook nose, either.

They step away from the sink, glove up and Sean pushes the curtain out of the way with his elbow. The patient is already prepped, her chest in relief against the cutaway surgical drape like an A-cup Advent calendar prize.

 

 

 

 

They pulled the beds apart before she even left, and since she was in the bathroom, the beds were the only place to retreat. She let herself out, and Christian lay perfectly still under the rough cotton university-issue bed sheet, and he could feel clammy sweat and the chemical stench of her perfume crawling on his body and making the sheet cling like wet newspaper and he wanted to get up, take a shower, fix himself a stiff drink and check into a four star hotel, but he didn't do any of those things, he just breathed lightly, in and out, but it still didn't seem to be getting enough oxygen to his brain.

Eventually the silence started to feel like a chemical peel on his already uncomfortable skin, and so he asked Sean if he had gotten what he wanted out of their round with the look-alike hooker.

Christian could see Sean shake his head without moving his own, out of the corner of his eye. Sean said, no, he still didn't know what it had been like when Christian had fucked his wife.

She hadn't been Sean's wife then, but Christian didn't say that. He said, what, does that mean you want to know what that it was like, then?

Sean said Christian had already told him more than enough and Christian said, no, I was thinking I could show you. That's what you really want, isn't it?

Maybe Christian had always assumed that it would end up like this, if only because there was nothing about any part of his life that had taught him how to properly compartmentalize love and family and sex and gratitude and shame and debt. Maybe it made sense that they did it here, Christian stretched out over Sean on a thin and creaky mattress, the claustrophobic space of a single mattress, because wasn't this right where they'd started? Maybe if they'd just done this back then, they wouldn't be in the mess they were in.

Christian reached for the last condom, which had been lying on the floor between the two beds. He didn't have a fucking clue what he was planning to do with it, he half-thought that just the sight of it between his thumb and fore-finger would snap Sean back to his senses, that he would push Christian out of the bed and Christian would go do whatever he needed to do to get that four-star hotel room. But Sean didn't move, didn't flinch, and just lay underneath Christian like a dead fish with a soft dick.

Christian thought about holding out the condom and asking Sean if this was what he really wanted, but he already knew what the answer would be.

Contrary to the popular opinion of most of the fags in South Beach, Christian had never fucked a guy in the ass, and he wasn't totally sure how to go about it. It couldn't be that different from screwing a woman's asshole, which wasn't Christian's favorite thing in the world, but he at least knew how to do it.

He didn't know how to fuck Sean, Sean who was lying underneath him like the bed was a dentist's chair, and part of Christian wanted to make it rough, wanted to fuck him into fighting, and fighting back, because that had been how it he would have imagined it would be with Sean, if he had ever let himself imagine it. But, no, it had to be gentle, because gentle was what he had been with Julia, and Julia was supposed to be who they were both thinking about, between them.

He swiped a finger across Sean's cheek, and maybe he was more stoned than he thought, but he thought that he could feel the microscopic creases in Sean's skin, because Sean had never committed to a proper skincare regimen, even though he was six months older than Christian and had two kids on top of everything else --

Christian was going to fuck Sean, and it would probably be bad, because he was pretty sure neither of them had ever done this before, and they were both pushing forty, had already come twice tonight and weren't as flexible as they used to be. And because they were best friends, and because neither of them was fucking gay, and because right now they hated each other.

But if Christian could go back, if he could have done this with Sean seventeen years ago, taken Julia out of the equation for good, and still ended up with Matt seventeen years later?

It was too late, it didn't matter, they would do this tonight and then never do it or probably even talk about it ever again. But if he was being truthful with himself, that was when Christian knew what he really wanted.

 

 

 

 

They do Mr. Beauchamp's final microvascular nasal reconstruction on a Thursday at 11:00 am, the palate cleanser after back-to-back mother/daughter liposuction. Mr. Beauchamp has been kind enough to supply them with about five hundred photographs of his monstrous nose from every angle possible and Sean's been working in close consult with their prosthetics guy. They inserted a skin expander with tissue from the forehead a couple weeks ago and if all goes according to plans, Mr. Beauchamp will once again be hideously disfigured and a walking example for the necessity of elective cosmetic surgery before the lunch hour.

Sean has the photograph of Mr. Beauchamp and his grandfather in a document clip on the instrument table, he says that it's in case they need to make any adjustments once the prosthetic is in place. Christian would rather not look at it.

Sean's establishing the blood supply when Christian says, "Do you think I look like my mother?"

"What do you mean?" Sean says, not looking up from the microsurgery.

"My biological mother," Christian says. "You saw her when she came to the police station, didn't you? Do you think that I look like her?"

Sean shakes his head. "I'm sorry," he says, "I really don't remember."

"I wanted to think that I looked like her," Christian says. "But I don't, really. She said, uh, she said I looked more like my father."

"Suction, please," Sean says. Linda leans across the patient's body for suction. She carefully doesn't look up, but Christian figures that if Linda was in the room a week after they got back from doing the Rosenberg case and Christian said, "Fuck you," and Sean snapped back, "Already tried it," there basically isn't anything they can't say in front of her.

"Ten blade," Sean says, and Christian reaches for the ten blade.

"I think you look like my--" Sean starts to say, and then stops himself. "I think you look like our son." He takes the ten blade from Christian's hand, their fingers slipping across each other in latex, but still warm.

 


End file.
